The 26th Annual Brian Bertoti Innovative Perspectives in History Conference featured 29 presentations by students from 16 institutions globally. Department of History graduate students organized the conference; faculty from the department served as discussants. The following Virginia Tech students presented papers; all of them are master’s students in History, unless otherwise noted:

  • Miles Abernethy, History and Political Science undergraduate, “House Divided, Home and Abroad: The Lost Cause in Interwar and World War II America”
  • Taylor Berkley, “‘You May Be Able to Help Solve A Mystery’: How Unsolved Mysteries Enrolled Viewers in the War on Crime, 1987-1992”
  • Caroline Brunner, “Go Unto All the World: An Analysis of the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, Radical Christianity, and Evangelicals the Late 20th Century”
  • Amanda Dean, “‘We Don’t Want Them in Our Schools’: Massive Resistance and Desegregation in Southwest Virginia”
  • Sara Evers, “‘Industrial Training. Racial Understanding. Agricultural Education’: Public History at the Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial (1945-1956)”
  • Katie Gibson, “The American Murderer Bathurst Bagby and the Eradication of Hookworm in Virginia”
  • Joseph Hearl, “Imperial Specimens: Species and the Spectacle of Print in the 1909 Smithsonian-Roosevelt Expedition”
  • William Ingalls, History undergraduate, “Attempted Erasure and Resilience: The Effects, Precursors, and Legacies of Eugenics on Native Peoples in Virginia; 1705-2015”
  • Bethany Stewart, “‘There Was a Stigma’: Poverty and Class Consciousness in a Black Appalachian School”

The conference took place at the Hahn Horticultural Garden Pavilion and the Graduate Life Center on March 31 and April 1.